A Scientists tool kit has to be bigger than ever before

Ask a 12 year old, your grandparents, or pretty much any member of the public what a scientist does and they will tell you that they work in a lab doing experiments. That is a scientist’s main job but anyone who has been part of a research environment knows that it’s not the full picture. This is especially true as you progress up the hierarchy, whether that be in industry or academia. A perfect example: my supervisors. I have two supervisors one I see in the lab fairly regularly, maybe once every week. While my other supervisor I have seen in a lab coat a grand total of 3 times in 3 years – and one of those was for a promotional photo.
It’s accepted that as you move higher up a research organisations structure the less time you actually spend in the lab; instead you will be managing other peoples work, taking care of administrative duties, and, if you are part of a university, teaching. All of these tasks give you less time in the lab so the responsibility falls to PhDs and post-docs to do the lab work, and be the boots-on-the-ground while you oversee their work. In theory this is a good way to organise work loads. But there is one problem – those doing the lab work also have other responsibilities and duties. When I talk to friends and family they assume that 90% of my time is spent in a lab and the rest is just writing up the results. Like any job there is always more than meets the eye. Being a PhD or Post-doc is a lot more than just research, think of the iceberg analogy: you only see the 10% above the water, what you don’t see is the other 90% under the water. With research people think of lab work, but what they don’t see is the planning, writing and hard work that actually gets you to that point.
As technology has advanced this situation has grown more complicated. I am writing this blog on a device that can do more than scientists of previous centuries could only dream of. Scientists would have need huge physical resources to do what we can now do with your average laptop. With my computer I can analyse results, review the literature and write a paper and send it away for publication, all while sat at home with a cup of tea. Previously I would need to analyse results using pen and paper, go to a physical library to read the literature and use a type writer to write the paper and then physically post it to a journal. Modern technology has streamlined the process, making it faster and easier for those of us doing research to generate results and start publishing. But all of this has come at a cost. Publishers, universities and companies are passing work down the chain.
A few decades ago a scientist’s main skills would have been technical; they would have a mental toolkit of techniques they knew how to perform. Now scientists are expected to have a much bigger toolkit and need more skills at their disposal if they want to survive as scientists. To show how big that toolkit has to be here are just some of the skills a scientist needs to do their job. 

A basic scientific toolkit
The foundation of a scientists skills are their technical knowledge and experimental ability; can they design and perform an experiment, collect results and understand what those results mean. This kind of technical know-how comes from experience; if you work with a piece of equipment regularly or perform one type of experiment over and over again you learn the ins and outs of that technique. This type of knowledge is field specific, for instance I am trained in electrochemistry so know how to set up and run an electrochemistry experiment, but if you ask me to go into a physics lab and start playing around with lasers I’ll likely set something (or someone) on fire.
Knowing how to use a piece of equipment is one thing but more often than not you also need to understand 1) how it works and 2) what kind of data it’s going to give you. The first piece of information you learn by reading textbooks, watching YouTube videos and talking to experts who already know how it works. This will teach you the theory behind the method, something you have to know so that when something inevitably goes wrong you will be able to fix it. The second thing you have to know is how to read the data you are collecting; this mainly comes reading papers which have used that method before and asking others who already know how to do it.
Alongside technical and experimental knowledge scientist need other skills, most of which have very little to do with science. Firstly, they need to be decent at managing their own time; what use is knowing how to do an experiment if you are never on time to start it. Managing a workload is a crucial part of a scientist’s job; they are probably working on multiple projects at once and have other responsibilities that they need to balance (not to mention they want to have a life outside of work).
The second important skills is paperwork. Documenting your experiments and staying on top of paperwork is crucial as a scientist. Whether it’s physical or digital scientists have to keep lab books, and they have to be legible so they can be understood by other scientists. On top of this they have to make sure risk assessments are up to date, keep track of any mandatory paperwork and make sure the results they have collected are kept in order. It’s not sexy but keeping track of paperwork is a skill.
Finally, we have one of the skills needed in almost any job – team work. Few scientist work in isolation; eventually you’ll need someone to train you on new equipment, help you design an experiment or tell you where the spare gloves are kept. Collaboration is key in science; so if you don’t play well with others you’re going to struggle.
Developing these skills is the foundation of a scientist’s toolkit; it allows them to work in the lab and conduct high quality research. Over the years the need for these analytical, management and team working skills hasn’t changed, but now these aren’t the only skills that a scientist needs to build.

We have to become sales people
You have the skills to work in the lab, you’ve had a brilliant idea for some research you want to do, and you know where has the equipment and best people to help you do the work. But the next problem is: how are you going to fund that work?
Funding for research can come from many places; government funding, charities or direct from industry. For government funding in the U.K you have the British Research Councils who all have long names; the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). While in the U.S you have the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).
To secure funding from these sources, or any other source, you have to write a grant – a document which convinces the people with the money why they should give you their money to do the research. As well as a document there are usually interviews, panels, long discussions; they pick apart you and your idea to make sure that your idea is good and that you will deliver what you promise. Because of this process scientists have to learn to become sale people; they have convince someone that their research is worth investing in. The problem is they don’t have an actual product; they are selling their research idea. This situation is made harder by the fact that you are usually competing with other scientist who also think their idea is worth funding. If you are lucky you will have some data, either your own or other peoples, to support your idea.
Scientists have to do this continually; as soon as one pot of funding runs out you have to have more lined up to carry on the work or fund a new idea. This process is one of the hardest parts of research; it regularly results in failure. It is one side of research that the general public don’t hear about, but for a scientist to have long-term job prospects they have to develop an ability to sell their work.

We are writers, graphic designers and editors
You’ve got the funding and you’ve got the skills so you go out and perform your research: then you discover a planet, design some spider-web technology or find a way to re-write human DNA. Now it’s your job to write that work up and get it published in a scientific journal so that it can be scrutinised by the scientific community.
Maybe you’re good at writing or maybe you haven’t had much practice, either way you did most of the work so you write it up. Once you have written the manuscript using your incredible writing skills you also need to put your results into a format people will understand. So you want to make a graphic that explains a key part of your work. But there is no one else around to do it, so you have to become a graphic designer. You might spend hours making a diagram which explains how your new cancer treatment kicks cancers butt or how your sustainable energy source will save the world. After all this you also need to collect some writing from the other people you worked with, now you have to edit it together so it makes sense. This means sitting and re-reading your section and theirs over and over again. The paper is finally done and you can send it off to a journal for publication. But that’s not the end – the paper is reviewed by other scientist who determine if the work is good and worth publishing. If they find anything wrong they will give what can sometimes be harsh feedback. Then it’s your job to edit the paper according to their feedback; they might be minor changes like adding in extra paragraphs or they might want you to redo whole experiments. Then once all of that is done you might get approved for publication.
Throughout this whole process you have had to be a writer, a graphic designer and an editor. These skills are some you don’t think of when you think of research, but publishing is part of being scientist which means scientists are having to learn these new skills to do their job.

Conclusion
As well as analytical skills a scientists needs to be able to sell their work to get it funded, do the work, then write it all up and then convince publishers to publish it. At some point it became the responsibility of scientists to become a jack-of-all-trades. To successfully publish and get funding they have to be able to do everything; but this attitude is likely contributing to the increased pressure PhDs and post-docs feel to fill their time productively. Eventually this pressure will get too much; their is only so much time in the day and only so much we can expect from those doing research. Until this attitude changes a scientists toolkit is expected to be infinite. But everything has it’s limit - how long until we realise we have pushed scientists to that limit?